Various types of mechanisms for handling microfiche automatically to carry out various operations are known in the art. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,049,342: 4,188,114; 4,056,321 and 4,354,787 all relate to such mechanisms and are all owned by the same assignee of the instant patent application. U.S. Pat. No. 4,049,342 is concerned with the transfer of microfiche from a cartridge to a microfiche viewer and discloses conveyor means including a separator arrangement to assure that only one microfiche at a time will be passed along the conveyor means. U.S. Pat. No. 4,188,114 discloses a microfiche scanner module capable of being substituted for a normal microfiche cartridge mechanism in a reader/printer projector to thereby enable the printing and displaying of data information stored on microfiche without requiring any major alterations in the reader/printer projector. U.S. Pat. No. 4,056,321 concerns a microfiche duplicator which may be of the type to which the transfer system of the present invention transports master microfiche. U.S. Pat. No. 4,354,787 is concerned primarily with a collating stacker for facilitating the separation of first and second sets of microfiche.
While the foregoing microfiche handling mechanisms serve their functions well, to the best of our knowledge, an effective microfiche transport or transfer system for passing master microfiche from a computer output microfiche unit to a duplicator unit has never, heretofore, been available. As a consequence, the practice has been to manually transfer the master microfiche to the duplicator which manual operation involves physically handling or touching of the master microfiche by operating personnel. While the transfer can be made in this manner, careful handling of the master microfiche is necessary to avoid smudging or damaging and thus the transfer operation itself takes time.
In further respect of the foregoing, the master microfiche are normally provided with a bar code containing instructions for the duplicator. For example, the bar code would tell the duplicator how many copies are to be made and whether or not to collate the various copies. In the event there is an error in the bar code such will not be detected until the duplicating operation begins. In other words, the duplicator will receive master microfiche with both good and bad bar codes and thus a substantial amount of time is wasted. If the master microfiche with bad bar codes or bar codes containing errors could be separated from those that are passed to the duplicator which have good bar codes, then the duplication process can be speeded up.